Page:Mexico (1829) Volumes 1 and 2.djvu/234

196 MEXICO. Iturbide, and rejected by them, becavise they conceived that it was setting too high a price upon the services of a man, so young, and so little distinguished, as he then was. However this may be, it is certain that all communication between them was broken off in disgust, and that Iturbide joined the troops assembled by the Viceroy V enegas for the defence of Mexico, in 1810, and distinguished himself in the action of Las Criices, under the orders of Truxillo. From that mo- ment his rise was rapid : his activity and knoAvledge of the country recommended him for every dangerous expedition ; and in these he was almost uniformly successful. As a Guer- rilla chief he displayed great military talent ; and, when en- trusted with more important commands, he inflicted two of the most severe blows that the Insurgent cause sustained, in the battles of Valladolid, and Piiriiaran, (where Morelos's great army was destroyed, and Matamoros taken,) and mainly contributed to the triumph of the Spanish arms. As he him- self states, he never failed but in the attack upon the fort of Coporo, in 1815, upon which occasion he volunteered his services, and led the party that was destined for the assault. He was afterwards appointed to an independent command in the Baxio, (an honour which few Creoles had obtained before him;) but there, as during the course of his previous career, he tarnished the lustre of his military exploits by giving loose to the violence of the most unbridled passions. Few even of the Spanish Commandants equalled him in cruelty : his pri- soners were seldom, if ever spared, and a dispatch of his is still extant, addressed to the Viceroy, after an action at Sal- vatTerra, dated Good Friday, 1814, in which he tells him that, " in honour of the day, he had just ordered three hun- dred excommunicated wretches to be shot !" This dispatch has been declared by Iturbide's partisans to be apocryphal ; but the original exists in the archives of the Viceroyalty. All, therefore, that can be said is, that these detestable executions, in cold blood, were but too much in